José Saramago

I'm reading Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago, these days. I was feeling up to a challenging read, and Saramago does not disappoint. This morning I read a paragraph that was 7½ pages long.

Saramago favors run-on sentences. What begins at the top of the page on one subject may wend down to the middle and pass through a number of subjects. The overall effect is of observing a world where there are no boundaries between people, events, and times — a sort of general haze.

So is it worth it? Tough question. Sometimes it's thoroughly engaging, and other times I get tired. This is my third book of his.. I must like it or I wouldn't keep doing it, right? Or maybe I just like reading a book with a badge on it labelling it a Nobel Prize winner.

When I'm done with this I should dive right into Moby Dick, which will feel like a warm bath in comparison.

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ADDENDUM:

I wrote this before leaving work to go home, and on the way home, read some more. Here's a passage I'd like to share. We have just been introduced to Signor Domenico Scarlatti, the Italian harpsichord teacher of the young Portuguese princess (the "Infanta"). After the lesson, the King, Queen, and Infanta leave, and we are left with the musician, as well as the priest Bartolomeu Lourenço, who is one of the main characters.

The Italian fingered the keyboard of the harpsichord, first at random, then as if searching for a motif or attempting to modify certain reverberations, and suddenly he appeared to be totally absorbed in the music he was playing, his hands running over the keayboard like a barge flowing on the current, arrested here and there by branches overhanging the riverbanks, then away at rapid speed before vacillating over the distended waters of a deep lake, the luminous bay of Naples, the mysterious and echoing canals of Venice, over the bright, shimmering light of the Tagus, there goes the King, the Queen has already retired to her apartments, the Infanta is bent over her embroidery frame, for an Infanta learns these things from childhood, and music is a profane rosary of sounds, Our Mother who art on earth.

It's all one sentence, and it needs to be to convey that feeling of music sweeping you across all places and all things in your life, and to establish that Scarlatti is no ordinary man, but a man of deep feeling and visceral understanding.

So my answer is, yes, it's worth it.

Labels: journal, personal

posted by Tony at 6:06 PM